RSS… WTF!
I’m not going to get into the debate about whether social networking is a good or bad thing. As an active member of Facebook and Twitter of course I’d say yes. But other people are just as much within their right to hate the things. Whether you use them, which sites you use, and how you use those sites, is completely down to you. Isn’t that the beauty of it all?
I have rejected Bebo. I am a member of MySpace and Linked In, but they don’t get used much. I have my iGoogle, but I don’t tend to use the Google Chat function. I am a complete Apple geek but have never been interested in iChat at all. Skype I dabble with now and then.
Twitter is my social networking addiction of choice, with Facebook a close second. Now I have DSLR and a lovely 50mm lens I’m sharing my photos on Flickr.
But what bugs me is the whole RSS feed thing. As an active blogger who frequently uses social networking, and has a computing background, you’d think that I’d be well ahead on understanding and using RSS. But I’ve just never really got my head around setting up an RSS reader. The more I tweet the more I find interesting people, with interesting blogs, but unless I actually remember to visit them I find that I miss out on the latest entries. Even my favourites such as xkcd get visited once in a blue moon for an intensive catch up.
But now I have discovered FriendFeed. I saw an article via Twitter on Mashable about Facebook taking over FriendFeed and decided to investigate. I didn’t get off to the greatest start – I imported all the Tweeps I follow, which made it into another Twitter, not what I wanted (and a pain to undo as there’s no bulk unfollow yet.)
Ultimately I thought that FriendFeed might be a solution to my RSS problem. After a few days away I’ve gone back to investigate further and now set up my FriendFeed as a subscription to the RSS feeds of all the blogs I would like to follow.
Sometimes all these social networks and related applications just make my head want to explode. As someone who finds them useful and actually gets enjoyment from using them, I can understand why people who aren’t technically minded get fed up with them all.
I haven’t got a clue if this approach will actually work. It’s just another attempt to extract what I am actually interested in reading from the huge amount of information out there in this ever-expanding digital universe!
Similar to you I use Twitter & Facebook predominantly. Although I have been using RSS Feeds for years, its the only way I can keep up with websites that I want to follow.
Personally I wouldn’t recommend FriendFeed as purely an RSS reader. To me FriendFeed is more useful to keep up with things in real time, a bit like Twitter but it allows you to comment on a post and see each persons comments in real time.
Check out Google Reader to read RSS feeds, I’ve been using this for the past couple of years or so.
I’ve seen a couple of videos by Robert Scoble with the ways he uses FriendFeed, they may be useful if you want to find out more about it.
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